ABSTRACT
An enduring criticism of phenomenology is that it fails to encompass difference in its examination of lived experience, and that the being of the phenomenon is grounded in the Same. While the post-structuralist critique of phenomenology threatened to fall back into a dualism between the body and thought, it is within Frantz Fanon’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that we can uncover a somatically grounded phenomenology of difference. I argue that Fanon’s engagement with Merleau-Ponty is more profound than his obvious encounter with Sartre’s notions of bad faith and being-for-others. This is most evident in the chapter The Lived Experience of the Black in his book Black Skin, White Masks. In this text, Fanon counters Merleau-Ponty’s core concept of the corporeal schema with the “schéma historico-racial.” Fanon uses the problematization of a core aspect of embodied phenomenology to challenge a naïve ontological approach to lived experience and engagement between self and world. In its place, and teasing out what remains somewhat implicit within the text, Fanon raises the prospect of a critical resistance to the impositions of history, beginning first with the reality that embodied difference opens up plural and contested versions of the world. In this sense, instead of the assumption that a phenomenological ontology grants a shared sense of being-in-the-world to all subjects, through an analysis of his own racialized experience, Fanon’s critique of Merleau-Ponty poses the prospect that a unified being and a unified world are the ideal of a community that does not yet exist.
